?Right time to think of metro for Indore?

THE TIME is ripe to think about a metro rail for Indore, but at present buses are the best means of public transport for cities like this, said Delhi Metro Rail Corporation managing director E Sreedharan while addressing the Indore Management Association (IMA) national convention here on Friday.

THE TIME is ripe to think about a metro rail for Indore, but at present buses are the best means of public transport for cities like this, said Delhi Metro Rail Corporation managing director E Sreedharan while addressing the Indore Management Association (IMA) national convention here on Friday.

Sreedharan, who was presented the ‘lifetime outstanding achievement award’ by IMA, said if a decision was taken now it would take another five to six years for the project to materialise and by another five to six years time the City’s landscape would change making it tougher to build a metro.

Indore, he said, has a population of about 2.6 million now and any city having a population of 3 million needs metro to manage the public transport.

Sharing his experiences of Delhi Metro project, which was completed in a record time, Sreedharan said during phase I of the project, the whole team adopted the culture of punctuality almost like a religion.

“Delhi Metro is probably the only metro in the world which has a delay tolerance of 60 seconds,’’ he said, adding, “I don’t think any other metro rail even in cities like London and Hong Kong has this kind of punctuality norms,” he said.
The whole project, Sreedharan said, was completed with the same sense of urgency and even big tenders were finalised within weeks while it took only few hours to clear the small tenders. “But there was not a single complaint or allegation of corruption against tenders involving the Delhi Metro project,” he said, adding, “We did not allow or tolerate any political interference in the project.”